United Airlines flights nationwide were grounded early
Wednesday morning, creating delays and long lines at airport terminals. The New
York Stock Exchange (NYSE) also suspended trading on Wednesday and stayed down
for nearly four hours. Minutes later, The Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) homepage
experienced an outage, possibly under intense traffic as a result of the NYSE
news.

It reminds me of the maxim, ‘when the tide goes out, you can
see who is bathing naked’. The simple fact is that failures such as these
frequently point to more deep-seated problems with ageing IT infrastructures.